B.C. premier wins close byelection

VANCOUVER — British Columbia Premier Christy Clark ended a decades-old government curse Wednesday and overcame her first minor bump in the road as leader of the BC Liberals by winning her predecessor’s seat in the Vancouver-Point Grey byelection.

Clark, the favourite, overcame strong criticism from her rivals and last-minute signs that her shoo-in victory wasn’t a guarantee to take ex-premier Gordon Campbell’s seat over the New Democratic Party’s David Eby.

Clark narrowly won with 6,438 votes over Eby’s 5,975, according to Elections BC.

The mood in the Clark camp alternated between despair and joy as she and Eby traded the lead throughout the night.

Eby was ahead for most of the evening until the final screen flash showed the unofficial result: Clark by a hair.

Even though Eby was narrowly defeated, his NDP team felt like winners.

Eby said while Clark ignored him for much of the campaign, he knew it was a tight race when her team circulated attack-ad flyers calling him “way too extreme” late last week.

“She started saying I was tearing up the social fabric,” Eby said with a grin.

An NDP official said Eby’s near win bodes well for the NDP in an upcoming provincial election. The official said NDP strategists gained confidence after Clark refused to debate Eby, instead targeting him with attack ads.

“Those last-minute attacks made us think she was feeling uncomfortable with polling results. We thought it was kind of desperate because the premier doesn’t attack people.”

The last time the government won a byelection was in 1981 when Claude Richmond won for the then-governing Social Credit Party.

Despite a spirited campaign, Eby, the former executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, wasn’t able to overcome the premier’s star power and experience, although the results show it was close.

Eby, 34, campaigned on the issues such as transit, health care and education, but it was Clark’s refusal to participate in any of the all-candidates debates that gave him his greatest ammunition and best chance at winning.

Clark, a former talk show host who won the Liberal leadership in February after a six-year hiatus from politics, said she was too busy to debate, while hosting her own telephone town hall meetings.

Meanwhile, she made several million-dollar announcements, held her own scripted face-to-face town hall meeting and participated in several staged photo ops including waiting on tables at a local diner.

This led to accusations from her opponents, chiefly Eby, of being arrogant, ignoring the issues and of taking voters for granted, while Clark claimed that her refusal to debate was a non-issue to the electorate.

In the end the riding, which has voted BC Liberal since 1996, chose to be represented by the premier rather than a novice politician.

The last NDP MLA to win the riding was Darlene Marzari, who beat Liberal Barry Burke in the 1991 general election by about 3,000 votes. Campbell won the next four elections, but the results were never a landslide.